‘Silent Occupation’ is a wandering course among the constrained landscapes of the Rhône river and its surroundings in the Rhône Valley in south-eastern France. Drawing its source from a glacier in the Swiss Alps, it travels 522km on French territory to the Rhône delta to flow into the Mediterranean Sea. While it is one of the most powerful rivers in Europe, it has been heavily developed since the 19th century. The violence of the changes it had endured make the Rhône a bruised river ; successively dammed, shaped, corrected, corseted to tame its unpredictable nature, increase human comfort and allow the development of cities in its wake. Until then repressed, it now carries environmental issues through an ambitious ongoing restoration project. In view of the developments built over the decades (dikes, dams, canals, diversions), the utilitarian imprint is still deep in the landscape and the scars persist. The once rich, lively and dynamic river has become a sort of drainage channel, domesticated and navigable. Nearly twenty hydroelectric plants operate its power through numerous dams and the four near big nuclear power plants discharge their cooling water in, upsetting the balance of the aquatic environment. The many architectures and utilitarian devices are witnesses to this exploitation, which have been grafted insidiously until sometimes become one with the landscape. On the fringes of the river, many interstitial areas that are now functionless and neglected raise questions. Symbol of life and movement, the river has always offered itself to the dreamlike imagination despite human intervention, retaining a tiny part of its wild character. Having grown up in a house overlooking the river, I have always perceived the river and its surroundings as places of freedom, favourable to exploration and daydreaming. Now an architect, and sensitized about the evolution of territories and landscape, I confront my free and naive child gaze with a new, more critical and informed dimension, and a new understanding of space. This ongoing series is not a traditional documentary about the Rhône river but an attentive wandering of its surroundings, its interstitial places, the symbols and questions raised by the interlacing of the life of a river with man’s habitat. In a dense atmosphere, torn between stillness and anxiety, the images lay the foundations for a silent theater where temporality is uncertain. A theater where each scene suggests the elements of a new story, the beginnings of a narrative, the outline of a fiction to come. A theater where reality and mystery intertwine, like a ghost hunting. Ghosts of a questioned childhood, of an architecture symbol of domination, of a fantasized wild nature.